Author: Jonah McConnell

You've heard of 3 goblins in a trench coat, but now get ready for 3 skills in a trench coat. That's right, for the low, low price of the nearest programmer's sanity, you too can have many skills show up as a single large skill! This probably sounds like a run-of-the-mill issue to anyone who has worked on UI programming. However, my move to working on UI programming in an unfamiliar engine this week had me feeling like I was going round and round in circles rather than making progress. When I'm working in Visual Studio, I can feel like I'm making progress as I step through with the debugger, solving error by error.  

As you can see the skills are laid out in a grid above. This was the desired result when creating a widget for each node as described in the data asset.  However, things rarely go so smoothly. The widgets all seemed to stack on top of one another when created programmatically. However, I couldn't verify this since I had no way to debug the UI and see where things were. I'm unsure if there's a way to do this in Unreal, but I was not able to find one currently. This meant I was juggling the possibilities the parent widgets were incorrectly sized, or that I wasn't using the right function or any other myriad of issues was the cause of my struggles.

It all came down to something so simple: names. For something that has been revered as holding so much power for millennia, it is shocking that it took me so long to conclude. Regardless of how obvious it looked in hindsight,  the issue took up a great deal of time before I realized that because the widgets had the same name, the creations silently failed, actually leaving a single widget (so long as you don't lift the trench coat). In the end, I concatenated the grid coordinates to the name for debugging purposes, only for it to solve the issue! I was grateful for things to work, but 3 days of looking at the same issue had me at a point that frustration only began to cover. 

All of that said, unlike the last few weeks, my usual gripe is absent. While my task took far longer than expected, and followed the usual trend of me learning a great deal, it was not due to me getting distracted or going on some tangentially related feature. This week I did much better at staying on task despite many other things happening throughout the week to pull me away from working. I utilized my resources well both onlinee and drawing on the experience of those around me to solve the problems that cropped up this week which was a staunch improvement over the last many weeks.